The subject matter disclosed herein relates to aircraft configurations and, more particularly, to aircraft configurations including overlapped prop-rotors.
A vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft is an aircraft that is capable of performing vertical (or short in the case of STOL aircraft) take-off and hover flight operations as well as forward flight operations. VTOL or STOL aircraft may be provided with fixed-wing or tilt-wing configurations that each have coincident benefits for given flight regimes.
Recently, emerging requirements indicate that needs exist for large VTOL transport aircraft. In such cases, performance and mission requirements may be defined that result in solutions requiring four prop-rotors. A four prop-rotor tiltiwing configuration can offer VTOL capabilities with fixed wing performance but often exhibit some adverse effects. For example, the placement of four prop-rotors along a wing span of a particular VTOL aircraft may result in the aircraft having a relatively large wing span that adversely affects overall operating width, ground clearance and prop-whirl flutter.